


Venice, 2015

by In_agony_and_ecstasy



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Anal Sex, Cuddling, Dreams and Nightmares, Explicit Sexual Content, Flashbacks, Flirting, Guilt, M/M, Non-Sexual Intimacy, Penance - Freeform, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot, Porn with Feelings, The Crusades, Top!Nicky, bottom!Joe, for once lmao, love language acts of service Nicky, non-sexual nudity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-11
Updated: 2020-08-11
Packaged: 2021-03-06 08:20:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,979
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25846465
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/In_agony_and_ecstasy/pseuds/In_agony_and_ecstasy
Summary: Nicky and Joe are keeping their heads down in a hotel in Venice after a mission that got a little too much attention. Nicky wakes from a nightmare about the Crusades that leaves him emotional. Joe wants to comfort him but all Nicky wants is to express his love and gratitude for Joe and make him feel good.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 23
Kudos: 182





	Venice, 2015

**Author's Note:**

> As with my last Joe x Nicky fic, if there's something not quite right or even outright offensive about my portrayal of either character's religion, culture, language, or history, please let me know and I will edit/delete as needed. 
> 
> But essentially, this is just about me wanting to write some top!Nicky since the fandom seemed to immediately and unanimously agree Joe is the only one that tops. And tbh, something about that really rubs me the wrong way, even though I too think Joe probably would more often than Nicky. And not that there aren't real-life gay men who have a preference and only do one or the other - which is totally okay - but when this headcanon is layered on top of the other headcanons about Joe being possessive or jealous, or about Joe being more aggressive, temperamental or violent, or all the headcanons about Joe basically worshiping the ground Nicky walks on with no real headcanons about Nicky doing the same...AND Joe is a man of color, who's Muslim and Nicky a white Catholic...all together, it just starts to get really gross at best and racist or Islamophobic at worst so. 
> 
> I just thought I'd write from Nicky's POV, with top!Nicky, so that Joe can get the attention and care he deserves but also so that I can see Joe being the soft and gentle and sweet and carefree and genuinely beautiful character I think he was meant to be seen as.

I wake from the nightmare I have most frequently. Joe sits on his prayer rug, out on the balcony of our hotel overlooking the canals of Venice, sketching with one hand and plucking grapes from a porcelain bowl sitting at his side with the other. Someone, on the street below us, is playing the violin for passerby, and the sun shines in at an angle that means it’s midday. Joe has let me sleep in. He doesn’t notice I’ve woken, even from a nightmare, because I’ve had this nightmare for so many centuries my body no longer responds to it the way it does other nightmares. 

It’s always me killing him. But in my dream, it both is him, and isn’t him. It’s both me, and a nameless priest, who has travelled to a foreign land with the intention of slaughtering those that land belongs to, because he believes that land belongs to him, in the name of his God, and not them, in the name of theirs. How many men did I kill before Joe? I once knew exactly how many, because with each kill I felt closer to Heaven than I had before. But since then, I’ve spent so many years repressing it I can’t be sure anymore. There were many. And though none of them were my Yusuf, they were somebody I killed just for being like him, and unlike him, they didn’t come back. 

I don’t have nightmares about killing anybody else, from any other time. No one I’ve killed once discovering I was immortal – no, once discovering everything I believed in was wrong, was a good person. No one I’ve killed since was innocent. 

But the Crusades. I’ve never been able to wash the guilt from my skin. It’s in my blood and bones. 

I tilt my head to get a better look at Joe. I lie still, gazing at the sun glinting off his black curls and brown skin. The scratching of his pencil against the paper is a soothing one, as familiar to me as the sound of my own breathing. 

When I first laid my eyes on him, off the battlefield, out of our battle gear, he was sitting under a tree in a meadow writing a poem, about me, I’d later learn. The sun’s beams were spilling through the leaves overhead and wind was threading through his hair and garments. In that moment, I remember trying to understand what I was feeling. To put into words what looking at him made me feel like. It wasn’t like what looking at any woman had ever felt like before, and I had seen plenty of women I thought were beautiful. Nor was it like looking at any man I’d ever looked at before, though there were men I’d looked at the way men were supposed to look at beautiful women. 

But beautiful really wasn’t the word for him anyway, as if any one word could possibly have been enough.

It wasn’t until years later I had any idea how to express it. 

Looking at him made me feel warm. Like the sun was rising within him and he was shining from the inside out and light was cast upon everything in the world in a way it never had been before and something rooted deeply in my heart, rooted so deeply I never knew it was there let alone buried it myself, grew into something that blossomed in that blinding light my eyes couldn’t yet adjust to but none the less gazed into. 

Whenever I first look at him each day, this is still how I feel. It is the feeling my heart lurches for each morning. It’s instinctual after all this time. And my eyes have long since adjusted. 

I don’t deserve him. I don’t mean it to be self-pitying. It’s just true. He doesn’t feel the same of course, but he also doesn’t blame me for what I did. He’s forgiven me, over and over. So many times now. I’ve ceased talking about how sorry I am so as to avoid his relentless forgiveness. 

He glances at me now, I don’t think because I’ve alerted him. He would have looked at me anyway. 

Our eyes meet, and he closes his sketchbook, leaving it on the rug. As he strides toward me carrying his bowl of grapes, I roll on to my back. Like he read my mind, he presses one knee onto the bed and hitches the other over my hips, straddling me. He wears a button-up shirt unbuttoned all the way down. Automatically, I place my hands on his hips inside his shirt like I have no other choice.

“Good _afternoon,_ ” he says, in a teasing tone. “Breakfast?”

He holds a grape above my mouth until I obediently open it. He drops the grape on my tongue and I feel his fingertips on my lips while I chew. 

“How did you –”

“Come here,” I say.

He quirks an eyebrow at me. Not just because of my tone, but because I so rarely interrupt him. There are only two reasons I ever do. The first being someone is about to kill him. The second being this. 

I pull him by his collar to me, kissing him and curling my fingers in his hair that smells like the ocean. He hums into it, and then moans, when I don’t let him go right away. Then I deepen it and clasp my arms behind the small of his back. 

When I do let him go free, he hovers, his eyes searching mine. They don’t look the way I want them to. They don’t look filled with desire, but with worry. 

“What’s wrong, _Cuore mio_?” 

I sigh. “Nothing you haven’t consoled me for a thousand times.” 

“Doesn’t matter how often I do it if it doesn’t work.”

I smile at him, and cradle his face in one of my palms, stroking his cheekbone. The bridge of his nose is flushed from a morning in the sun. 

“Spare me your forgiveness today, okay?” I ask, and clarity passes over his face. 

“Nicolò –”

I sit up enough to kiss him again, and when he exhales I know I’ve won. 

“Today,” he says.

“Thank you, _ya hayati_ ,” I say, and before he can react, flip him onto his back, spilling his grapes all over our sheets. 

He snickers as I mouth my way along his neck below his freshly trimmed beard. 

“You don’t want breakfast, then, I take it?” he asks.

I tilt my head up to look him in the eyes and then kiss him again. “I want you.” 

Joe drops the bowl and it rolls off the bed and dinks on the rug without breaking. He wraps his arms around my shoulders and kisses me back slowly at first, and then more languidly, savoring it. 

“Like this?” he asks, gesturing to our position, and I nod while kissing his neck again. 

Then my hands roam down his stomach, latching again on to his hips. My fingers curl underneath the waistline of his boxers. I don’t want to pull away from him, but I do anyway, sitting up so he can slide both sides of his shirt off his shoulders, not bothering even to remove it out from underneath his body before lying back down. I trail my hand down his chest again, over his heart and his ribs and stomach, through the hair there and onto his hipbone. Any time I undress him, I take a moment to really look at him, and appreciate what he is. I never want to let myself take this for granted. Even if I’ve memorized every line and hair and mark on his body, even if it’s long since become as familiar to me as my own, I never want to forget what this means to me. How differently everything could have been. If we weren’t immortal or if one of us lost our immortality already, and never woke up –

I can’t even think of it, and I look at his face to calm me down. 

He places a hand on my cheek and says, “ _Cuore mio_ , I’m here.”

I swallow, fighting back a wave of emotion, and then begin kissing my way down his chest. He lifts his hips for me after I’ve unbuttoned and unzipped his jeans. Then I drag them down along with his boxers, slowly, because I can’t resist mouthing at the inside of his thighs. When I’ve gotten them far enough down, he kicks them off the rest of the way for me.

His socks have barely tapped the floor before he’s reaching for me, pulling me back into him by my wrist, then my arm, then my nape. I ease myself over him, exhaling deeply through our kiss when the lengths of our bodies meet and I can feel, since I never put clothes back on last night, his skin against mine, head to toe. Without needing to be asked, Joe gropes around the sheets until he finds the lube abandoned in the spot he tossed it last night. 

I take it from him and say, “It’s been a while for you.” 

He scoffs. “Two weeks?”

“At least. Should I take it easy on you?” I tease. 

He grins before shaking his head. “I never take it easy on you. Not even after Lent.” 

My mind wanders back a couple of decades. Spring time in Malta, a year when there was less than a week between the ending of Lent and the beginning of Ramadan. We’re rarely bothered right after Lent anyway, given Booker and Andy can barely stand the tension between us and asking us to focus on anything for more than five minutes is impossible. But this year in particular, we wouldn’t have even answered a check-up call. 

Instead, he and I spent days locked in the bedroom of a house we’ve owned since 1640, not getting dressed the entire time. We were touch-starved, hungry after abstaining for forty days, and desperately trying to get our fill before having to go a month without each other’s hands, or mouths, or bodies during the day. Nothing else is as difficult. Not fasting. Not giving up wine and champagne. Just resisting him, all the while he’s right there. Agony. 

“Yes, but I don’t want you to,” I say after a long moment, while trailing one of my hands up his thigh. He smirks at me like he knows exactly what I’m thinking. 

“I don’t want you to either,” he says, and crosses his arms behind his head. 

I arch an eyebrow, but say, “Anything you want, then, _ya hayati_.” 

And then I bow my head to kiss up and down his length, He exhales when a moment later I ease my mouth over him and let him harden all the way against my tongue. I savor this feeling; it’s one of my favorites. 

I do take it easy at first, not for him but for me, inching him further back until I can’t swallow any more of him. Then, as I start to bob my head, I hitch his right leg back and up. I don’t need to pull away to flick the cap open on the lube and squeeze some onto my hand. I’ve been doing it since snap-caps were invented. 

With my middle finger first, I slip inside him slowly. Again he exhales, and his breath only deepens from that moment on, my mouth steady on him, exactly how he likes, perfected over centuries of practice, and my fingers just the same once I have two in, pressing gently over and over exactly where he needs them. I could end it here if I wanted to. With my mouth or fingers or both. I could make him beg or pray or moan or grin or curse. I have lured each out of him ten thousand times with just the pads of my fingers, the tip of my tongue. 

Sometimes when I’m going down on him like this, and he’s naked and his scent is so strong, and all I can taste is his skin and salt, I think back to the first time. It’s so easy to close my eyes and go back to how it felt, if not how it looked from a bird’s eye view. From God’s view, rather. I can’t remember if we were indoors or outdoors. If people were nearby or not. If it was day or night. If it was spring or fall.

But I can remember the both of us trembling, timid at first, barely daring to touch the other’s body while we kissed. And only moments later, frantically undressing and mouthing at one another’s throats and shoulders and chests. I could feel his weight over me, exactly the same to this day. His hands mapping me out, lingering where he liked most. 

He was not the first to do so. I had ventured that far with a few others. In barns and in bed and even in pews. But it had always been rushed, and just hands, and no eye contact, and the long way around a means to an end I often felt afterward, wasn’t worth it. I could have done it myself and the sin wouldn’t have felt as wrong. If it was just me, what could I do? The urge to kill an ache was there and so was the bow and so was the arrow. If it was just me, killing an ache, it felt as unavoidable as all the other sins I confessed to. All the sins everyone agreed everyone committed sometimes, no matter how hard they tried not to, because they were human and no human was without sin. But bringing someone else into it –that was premeditated. That was overkill. And I never confessed to it, though my self-imposed penance was harsher than any other priest would have suggested necessary. 

The Crusades. Or – At the time, the Crusade, was my penance. 

In any case, I remember the first time with Yusuf. How the feeling of him inside me made me dig my nails into his back and moan words I hadn’t taught him yet and how afterward, I didn’t feel a Goddamned thing about it other than I wanted more. Right then, and the next day and well, ever since. 

We talked after – after we couldn’t go again, not after the first time. He told me, with his limited vocabulary – not as limited as mine was in his language at that point – he’d been with two other men, though not romantically. People like him he loved, but not that way. Then he asked if that was my first time. When I told him it was the first time I committed sodomy this way I had to explain, and his brow furrowed. He didn’t understand the word sodomy, and after explaining both to him as best I could without dying of embarrassment and shame, he seemed to understand. 

Not just understand what I meant, but understand what I felt. He shared with me the good and the bad perceptions of men like us that existed where he was from. Much of his poetry was about loving men, and was regarded highly by those who’d read it, but those who’d read it were the very same people who would be disgusted to know he’d slept with a man “in the woman’s position” before. The very reason he wrote the poetry he did was so that he could safely express both his love for men and hatred of men who hated men like him. I listened to him more closely than I ever had a sermon while he spoke. I could not imagine being so brave, and especially, so certain that I was not the one in the wrong. He made me want to speak out too. Made me want to show everyone that love like mine was nothing to be ashamed of. He changed my life. Since meeting him, since giving up killing him, and then, giving up keeping him at arm’s length – there was already no going back, but after this, there was no looking back either. 

He’s wet now. I pull off some and use my free hand to inch his foreskin down. Then I press my tongue against the underside of the head and lick some precum off the tip. That earns me a moan. 

“ _Dio mio,_ ” he mutters, “Come here, _Cuore_. You’re too far away and I’m too close.”

I snort with him still on my tongue before pulling away. He grins and reaches for me. I give him my hand but stay back long enough to cover my own length with lube. I wasn’t paying attention to myself, but now that I am I realize how badly I ache and my hand, though for a moment provides relief, is not enough. I need him. 

Finally I lie myself over him and once again feel his skin all the way down my body, but this time he’s pressed hard and wet against me. I sigh into our kissing. It is a delicious feeling. 

Without me needing to ask, he lifts both legs and I instinctually hitch one up with my hand hooked beneath his knee. With my other hand I guide myself inside of him, as slow and sweet as ever. Instantly, I’m overwhelmed, dropping my head on his chest and moaning. Every time I do this, I think about how I should do this more, and if it weren’t for the reverse being that much more irresistible, maybe I finally would. For now, I just close my eyes and let the feeling swallow me whole.

A moment later, Joe combs his fingers through my hair, breathing heavily, which is his way of letting me know he’s ready. I lift my head and cup his face with one hand and use the other to push his leg further back. His other leg wraps around my waist, pushing me into him even more. I smile, kiss him, and begin thrusting.

He’s all hands again, like the first time, like always, mapping me out, unable to find anywhere to rest before thinking of somewhere else he wishes to touch. His lips and tongue and teeth are on my shoulder, then my collarbone, then my throat, and I use this feeling to keep me grounded. I’m torn between glancing over every part of him constantly, fueling my desire for him, and closing my eyes so that I can hope to keep this pace long enough for him. It has been a few centuries since I could not place my own pleasure on the backburner long enough to prioritize his, but he tests me every single Goddamned time.

When his mouth reaches my earlobe and I can feel his breath in its shell, and he moans my name, and tells me he could live forever and there’d still never be another he wants like this, another who makes him feel like this, we could live forever and there would still not be enough time for him to get enough of me – he knows what he’s doing. He knows I won’t be able to resist pressing both of his legs further back and thrusting harder, and faster, and on the brink of breaking this fucking bed. He knows how close he can get me with just his voice. 

Then I’m doing the same to him. Long lost Arabic phrases spilling from my mouth against his throat and lips, along with his name, _Yusuf_ , again and again, each time my voice near breaking as the pleasure begins to swell and it is all I can bear not to bite into his flesh and scream. 

His arms and legs clamp around me, and I know he’s almost there. I only have to endure for a few more minutes. Seconds if I use my hand, and so I reach between us and grasp him, stroking him the way I know he needs, as I have done for so long now it’s muscle memory, nothing like the first few thousand times we did this and I still had to sacrifice my pace or my balance or the pure ecstasy that was watching him come seconds before I did –

And he was, then, throwing his head back, moaning my name, and it is the sight of him overwhelmed with pleasure that makes my own unbearable. I crush my chest against his and kiss him like my life depends on it just in time for my vision to go white and the pleasure to overflow in waves inside me. 

A year could have passed and I wouldn’t have noticed. When I open my eyes I scarcely remember what country I am in or what decade it is. The only thing that makes sense to me is Yusuf. 

His eyes meet mine and when I slump on top of him face first, he cracks a grin and laughs at me, tousling my hair. I listen to his heartbeat, steadily slowing down. It steadies my own. I exhale, deeply. 

“I’m afraid we crushed a few grapes, Nico,” he says, and I laugh against his chest. 

“The poor housekeepers,” I say, “We’ve ruined the sheets.”

He nods, glancing at the mess. “In more ways than one.”

Finally, I have the strength to pull out of him and we both sigh at the loss. He gestures for me to come closer to him and I do, lying beside him so that I can rest my head against his chest and he can curl an arm around my shoulders. 

“Andy called this morning,” he says, and I nod. We have been in Venice too long, too close to home. It’s been nearly a month since our last job, and it’s only been that long because our actions – preventing a bombing in the Netherlands – made the news. Our faces didn’t, but images of four armed people, three carrying ancient weapons with them, entering and leaving a building that would be destroyed by gunfire, was too close of a call. 

“When do we leave?” I ask.

“A couple of days,” he says, “Earlier if you want to detour for baklava.”

I smile, though it’s saddened. Not by Andy’s call, or the work we’re about to do. I miss her and Booker like I always do, no matter how little time has passed, and I want to be doing whatever good I can be doing. 

But sometimes I think of retreating to our home in Malta. With its vegetable garden but no vegetables, and its stray cats but no pets, and its artefacts from all over the world from as many different times, but no pictures of us, and all covered in a blanket of dust. Sometimes I just want to go home with him, cook him dinner each night and drink wine on the couch with a movie in, or a book in his lap to read to me. And when Andy calls, for it to be about whether or not she should bring something to dinner or not, or to ask if Booker already arrived. 

“Are you ready to tell me what’s on your mind?” Joe asks. 

I glance up at him, and his eyes are waiting expectantly. 

“Let’s stay here as long as we can,” I say, and he smiles knowingly, before kissing my forehead. 

“If that’s what you want, _Cuore mio_ ,” he says. 

I nod, to let him know it is, and then I glance up at him. “I should go out and get us something to eat.”

“Shower with me,” he says, “and then we can go together.”

I lift my head up to kiss him, and he hums contentedly into it. When our lips part I stand up and pull him by his hand toward the shower.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading and putting up with my little rant at the beginning!


End file.
